Lucio Dalla
Luna Matana

Yes, going back to the South, sometimes Lucio did that, taking his ideas and toupee to rest in Milo, Sicily, or to the Tremiti Islands in Puglia, and he would start weaving the threads of his new songs again, always trying to renew himself, of course. He risked, at times, producing the unexpected gaudiness of songs like "Zingaro," "Anni luce," "Serial Killer," "Baggio Baggio," four of the most tired, bloated, and predictable tracks Dalla ever wrote, but even in the years when he seemed to slack off on the singer-songwriter front, as he was always sucked into a thousand other projects (opera, theater, art galleries, soundtracks, appearances on various TV shows), the Spider nonetheless gave absolute master strokes. Here, in good order: "Chi sarò io," a disturbing, modern song with a particularly evocative lyric, "Siciliano" with a fantastic musical and vocal texture, "La strada e la stella," one of the best ballads in the entire Bolognese repertoire, so full of reflections on the impossibility of any romantic relationship and the ancestral fear of absolute solitude, that it still enchants with a more focused listening for its depth, "Notte americana," written with Nava, which has a singing moment that is among the most piercing and heartfelt in Dalla's entire career, "Agnese Dellecocomere," a song about lost innocence never to be found again, of those who truly felt free only in that middle land that is adolescence - an adolescence already admirably described in past pieces like "Cuori di Gesù" and "Amici"- and, finally, "Domenico Sputo," an absolutely fundamental song to understand the poetic and singer-songwriter universe of Lucio present, past, and future: a constant despair cloaked in irony and vagrancy. "Kamikaze" deserves just a small mention, as it could have been a great song, but it stops halfway, almost afraid to be truly explosive. Yet, regardless of what the usual critics posing as wolves (but they are sheep and will remain so) say, Lucio continues to shoot unique arrows from his bow; and his heart still holds.